It’s mid-terms. Students are panicked; they need extra help. If you’re a college instructor, you open up more office hours so you can assuage students’ anxiety. Students sign up but don’t show up. GRRRRRRR!!!

This episode features Robin, an extremely busy professor (like most teachers!) who got really mad when some students blew off the appointments they (voluntarily) signed up for. And didn’t contact her to explain why! How should she deal with this blatant inconsiderateness? What could she do with her insistent anger and disappointment? How did her Teacher Support Group help her turn it around?

In this episode we consider

* how to unpack anger and disappointment

* who has the power to change whom

* how the hell not to take students’ thoughtless behavior personally

* how to distill out the real issue from a swirl of emotions

It can be so difficult not to take bad behavior personally! If you’re feeling terrible about yourself because of stuff your students are doing (or not doing), I’d love to hear about it. I can help you do the seemingly impossible: restore you to self-confidence and help you give the responsibility for bad behavior back to your students. Just click on Share a Story on the TTE home page and send me the details. Totally confidentially. I’d love to hear from you.

Teaching through Emotions is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

COVID was extremely, unusually, horribly difficult for most if not all teachers. Jeremy, a math teacher, was no exception. He was pretty sure he could not teach under COVID conditions — until he figured out how to make his classes fun even when they were fully remote. Of course, COVID is behind us now (thank goodness). But teachers can still feel deeply disconnected from their students.

In this episode, we explore

* how to reverse self-doubt

* the importance of knowing your strengths AND your weaknesses

* how to think about making classrooms (even when they’re remote) fun

* the importance of relationships — between teacher and students, between student and student, and between students and the content

We’re not living through a pandemic anymore, but we are seeing behaviors in classrooms that were rare pre-COVID. If you have a knotty problem you’d like to get some relief from, click on Share a Story and type away! It’s completely confidential. I’ll get in touch and we’ll go from there.

Teaching through Emotions is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.